Never mind the soccer, listen to the chatter

“Ferguson: Get Mourinho”; “Fergie mocks Mourinho mind games”; “Master baiter Mourinho prepares for war with Manchester United”. These are some of the old headlines that will be dredged up before Inter Milan (coached by José Mourinho) play United (coached by Sir Alex Ferguson) in the Champions League on Tuesday. Millions of people will waste portions of their lives reading this sort of thing. Far fewer people will bother watching the match itself.

As Umberto Eco, the Italian author, has argued, most sports fans prefer “sports chatter” to sport itself. People consume soccer, in particular, not so much by playing or watching it as by talking about it. However, the ways in which people talk about it change with the times. Here are some of the main varieties of “soccer chatter”:

Soccer as a game. Talking about soccer as it is actually played on the pitch is fairly rare. This discourse is mostly limited to specialist sports newspapers such as L’Equipe or Gazzetta dello Sport, and television programmes such as Match of the Day in the UK. Here, pundits will debate a right-back’s reading of offside or criticise a coach’s persistence with a “midfield diamond”. However, few fans are that interested in soccer itself. That became clear when Match of the Day moved to prime time on Saturday nights and flopped.

Soccer as soap opera. This is far more popular than the game. The soap opera turns soccer people into almost three-dimensional characters who are perennially in conflict. In the British version, almost all the speaking parts are given to managers because soccer players who make any but the most banal comments get punished by their clubs. Typically, players appear in the soap opera as guest stars only when they slug somebody outside a nightclub.

Soccer as war. This discourse has fallen into disuse. It was common in the days when a game between a British and a foreign team would be presented in the British media as a contest between manly Britons and snivelling continentals. Now that all big teams consist of multinational mercenaries, all of whom play the same pan-European style, Churchillian talk seems inappropriate.

Soccer as morality play. Moralising was never as common in European soccer as in American sports. When Alex Rodríguez, the US baseball player, admitted recently that he had used steroids, his press conference was cast as a trial in which a one-time role model is exposed as a villain.

But few Europeans have ever regarded soccer players as role models. Occasionally the British media try to contrast true heroes of yesteryear (Bobby Moore or the alcoholic George Best) with the overpaid fashion models of today, but this is hard to sustain given that the current bunch works harder, drinks less and is generally more professional and no more gormless than its predecessor.

When a soccer player falls à la Rodríguez, everyone enjoys the spectacle but nobody is shocked. Indeed, the few players who could be role models for monks or small children, such as the saintly Brazilian Kaká, are treated with impatience.

Soccer as business. This kind of chatter has increased since the 1990s, when the game turned into something of a free market. A club’s financial fortunes became the best lead indicator of its playing fortunes and so soccer chatter began to centre on fat men in suits or sheikhs in white robes. The biggest hindrance to talking about this is widespread financial illiteracy. For instance, after Manchester United floated on the stock market, most journalists who covered the club assumed that United’s share price must be a secret that could be revealed only through investigative digging.

Soccer as absurd lowbrow pursuit. Eco dismissed the sport as a “cosmic meaningless performance”. However, the highbrow scorn for soccer that prevailed before the 1990s has almost died out, as old hierarchies of high and low culture have collapsed. Talking about soccer has become one of the most common modes of European male conversation and is now roping in worrying numbers of women too.

simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com